The Transcendental Murder by Jane Langton Page A

bicycle pump and a yak’s hair fetish to the native lady’s maid of a missionary’s wife. Years later it went along with the lady’s maid and the missionary’s wife and the missionary all the way back to Boston for an Evangelical Congress, and then it found its way back at last to the Concord Girl Scout Rummage Sale (the lady’s maid had discovered Filene’s Basement). At the Rummage Sale it was clawed off the rack by an eager Mrs. Bewley, who couldn’t fail to notice how much the buttons down the front resembled the beady brown eyes of her squirrel neckpiece. There were squirrels, definitely, running around inside Mrs. Bewley’s head. But her eyes were as sharp and scavenging as ever. They saw something lying on the ground across the field, something that looked out of place. Out of place, hopeful and lost, as if it didn’t belong to a solitary human soul. Of course if anybody should happen to come to Mrs. Bewley and ask for it she would be very glad indeed to give it right back. Mrs. Bewley scrambled over the stone wall and scuttled down the sloping field …

Chapter 16
Crisis is a Hair
Toward which forces creep
Past which forces retrograde …
EMILY DICKINSON
    One of the tourists from Texas had longer legs than Patrolman Vine. He brushed past him and bounded down the path. “I’m a doctor,” he hollered over his shoulder. Ralph Chope was the representative of a floor machinery company in Houston, but he had been a medical corpsman in the Korean War, and if there was one thing he knew how to do in the medical line, it was tell if a poor devil was dead or not. By the time Patrolman Vine came pounding up, Chope had administered his tests on the body, and had rolled it over and was groping with his fingers in the wound.
    â€œIs he dead?”
    â€œHe sure is. Jeez, look at that. The ball went all the way through him and out the other side, almost.” The Texan held up something between two fingers. “Looky here. That’s a regular old-fashioned musket ball. Say, this sure is some show you’re puttin’on here.”
    Patrolman Vine didn’t think that was funny. He took the musket ball and looked at it, then wrapped it up in a clean handkerchief and put it in his pocket. He stared at the corpse, then wheeled and looked sharply at a growing audience of Texas tourists, the bus driver and the woman with the baby carriage. “ Okay ,” he said loudly. “Get back, now. Don’t anybody touch anything.”

Chapter 17
The village appeared to me a great news room … These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers …
HENRY THOREAU
    Letitia Jellicoe, acting as a substitute guide for the holiday in the Old Manse, had arrived with a young couple at the upstairs room which both Emerson and Hawthorne had used as a study. She pointed to the window that looked down toward the bridge and started her spiel. “You will see written on the glass with Mrs. Hawthorne’s diamond the words ‘Man’s accidents are GOD’S purposes .’” The young couple drifted toward the window, but Mrs. Jellicoe, suddenly sharpening and lengthening her focus, pounced at the window and got there first. Wasn’t that a policeman running down toward the bridge? Was he chasing that man? “Thief, thief!” twittered Mrs. Jellicoe, and abandoning her charges she ran downstairs and across the field, crying, “Stop, thief!” at the top of her lungs. Broadcasting exotic and shocking pieces of information was meat and potatoes to Mrs. Jellicoe. Coming up against a crowd of people she elbowed her way to the front, and sucked in the whole frightful scene.
    â€œThat’s Ernest Goss, isn’t it?” she said sharply. “Did somebody …?”
    Arthur Furry spoke up then, with the information that was trembling on his